I saw this on Product Hunt and checked it out today. I was impressed by how seamless the user experience was. Well done. Do you mind sharing the tech that was used to build this?
Thanks for trying Floutwork and for the review. I plan to enhance the built-in Bookmarks app to make its value more evident. I'll also work on better explaining how your web apps and built-in apps work together.
Quick summary of some key capabilities: You can select any text in any web app, right-click, and add it to your tasks or notes. Imagine reading an email or a message on Slack or LinkedIn that you want to follow up on; this feature can come in handy without requiring you to switch contexts or lose your flow. You also have the option to capture a screenshot and the current URL when adding a task or note, providing complete context for future reference. This context is stored in your task notes for tasks and right along with your note in the case of notes. The same goes for links or tabs; you can right-click to add them to your bookmarks. We often receive numerous links via email, Slack, etc. You can easily right-click on those links to add them to your bookmarks, organized by tags, without leaving your flow. These improvements significantly reduce the friction associated with context-switching.
You can also quickly add tasks, notes, and bookmarks using the command bar. Simply type CMD+1 from anywhere, and the command bar will open. From there, you can select the action you want to take without interrupting your workflow.
Additionally, you can open the command bar and start typing the bookmark name, then press Enter to quickly access it. Pressing SHIFT+ENTER on the bookmark or any typed URL will automatically open it in split view.
asks me to create an account - The intent behind an account is so you can access your tasks, notes, links and other preferences via mobile or via another laptop. I do have plans of building a local-only mode eventually for folks who might be interested in that.
asks for admin permissions - The app doesn’t need special admin permissions. However, there might rules in your OS that require admin permission to install any software.
I agree that losing focus while trying to add a task can be disruptive. I recognized that as an issue. So I've aimed to make this process seamless in Floutwork. For instance, if you're in a meeting, you can open a command bar via a keyboard shortcut (CMD+1) and type tasks like "Get back with Mike next week" or "Follow up with Dan at 3pm." You can close the command bar by clicking outside of it, returning to your original view without losing focus.
If you're on a web page and find something worth following up on, you can select the text, right-click, and choose "Add Task," optionally setting a time like "Tomorrow" or "Next week." Alternatively, you can select "Add Task with Screenshot" to capture the current view and URL for future reference. The same can be done by right-clicking any open tab, allowing you to close it and remove it from your view until you're ready to revisit the task.
Another way to add tasks without losing focus is to click the tasks icon at the top-right corner of any web app to open a side view. Here, you can quickly add multiple tasks and then close the Split View.
The goal is to make task creation simple and focus-friendly, enabling you to get tasks out of your head while maintaining your current activity so I wanted to provide a few different options within the app. Do you think this approach would be helpful for you?
Really appreciate the detailed comment, encouragement, and references. This is just the first step for Floutwork. Down the road, I plan to create functionality ('layer below web apps,' as you put it) to extract useful details from websites and present them in ways that are both private to you and beneficial to your workflow. Also, the task times shown on your calendar will automatically adjust to your busy meeting schedules, and any updates to your meetings are recognized, prompting a new plan to be presented. This way, you don't have to worry about dragging and dropping events all over your calendar; you can focus on your task list and provide essential details like duration or priority. The rest will be taken care of for you.
That's great! Thanks for the clarification, I might have to poke around more with it and I look forward to seeing your next steps. Some additional thoughts in case they're of interest:
My main go to market concern is that by requiring users adopt a whole new approach to work in order to get value out of your solution you're limiting your market to those most willing to adopt new workflows. These users tend to be 'productivity tourists' that may churn faster than you expect, while users beyond these are likely to demand a much higher level of product quality to match the level of commitment required and that will be hard to achieve across the spectrum of features you offer [1].
To reach a broader market or possibly even sustainable side project income I believe you'll have to demonstrate value at each step of commitment, from 'I like it for one thing' to 'I'm all in baby!' and everywhere between. This requires really thinking about how to reconfigure the product around incremental value propositions.
My sense is as you go down this road you'll find your approach shifting (and possibly pivoting?) from a holistic workflow to diving deep on specific features that get people onboard, but that's just my guess.
I do think extracting useful bits from webpages and bringing them up in the appropriate context is a great area to focus on, and can be a feature that demonstrates value quickly to a wider audience. Some examples:
A. On a given workstream I'm waiting for Julia to message me. I don't want to see anything else from Slack, Figma, email, github, or whatever, all of which break my flow. Ideally I communicate to the system at a high level that this workstream is blocked on Julia, and it figures out the rest: A) that it should look for any contact or notifications from Julia and present them here, B) that if I do not hear anything back for a certain time I may get a reminder to bug her again, C) that the entirety of the workstream does not have to enter my 'executive purview' until this blocker is released or unless a period of time has passed.
B. On a Discord about an app I like, I want to know if anyone is talking about 'better autocomplete', a particular feature I want. I tell the system 'let me know when someone mentions this so I can jump in the discussion'. The system has discord running in the background, scanning channels until this hits, and delivers me a notification.
The theory behind this is that our attention and the rules about things that matter to us need to be defined at the OS-level where our executive function lies, where all rules can be weighed against each other, and where major categories of our lives can be properly compartmentalized.
Push notifications are insufficient for this because they are at the wrong layer: apps have no idea what matters to us or what else is going on in our lives, so they're a combination of too chatty and off the mark wrt the things we care about. Plus each one has different settings and notification capabilities.
Instead we need what amount to 'Pull notifications' so we can be freed of the need to check on various contexts and can fully let them go from our mind. But this requires a system sufficiently powerful enough to mimic the human-like gestalt understanding of what's actually happening in any given context [2]. AI is the enabling technology to do this and unlocks these kinds of use cases. It lets us unbundle interfaces & value from messy, anachronistic, and sometimes user-hostile apps. This is so powerful.
From a product-direction perspective I think that's the most compelling use case to explore at your stage, because
a) its novel & useful,
b) its useful even if used minimally,
c) it provides a path toward greater user commitment,
d) its easy to communicate to the market,
e) it opens up a bigger market of potential users,
f) it lets you continue the deeper Floutwork orchestration ideas you've started with, so it's not abandoning your motivation, hard work, and journey building this.
In particular, the work is to identify a host of use cases like the above where users can make high-level asks for things and you build smart assumptions for the system to solve those use cases. This is only possible if there's an orchestration layer / 'executive purview' to manage all of these drags on your attention. And you've built the groundwork for that with Floutwork! I hope you seize the opportunity :)
[1]: This is the classic 'well-integrated but not great' vs 'best-in-class but only does one thing' bundle/unbundle schism in tech.
[2]: e.g. we see things from the top-down, whereas traditional 'extract things from webpages' sees them from divs on up, which cannot solve most important use cases.
This is great insight. Appreciate you exploring the use cases in more detail and identifying where the value might reside. This is valuable feedback for me to consider and look into further.
I agree. If you work on the web, your web browser is your 'all-in-one app,' so to speak. Floutwork's goal is to make that workflow streamlined, focused, and organized so you can be way more successful at work.
